Responsabilidad ética

“Out of all that I have told you, all has not yet come true,” he replied enigmatically. “But there must be one thing plain to you, that there is radium here, whether I have found it or not. And it must be plain, even to you, that there is gold that has not been dug, and electrical power in the greater waterfalls of the rivers that has not been harnessed, and great forests of magnificent woods that have not been explored, and mineral deposits of vast value that they have not mined. Those stupid Dutch burghers in Paramaribo, with their narrow views—what do they know of colonization, what do they know of development? They think only of the present. They sleep with their black sluts, they beget themselves half-breed children to help them in their impotent

governing. They are blind! Waste, waste, waste! – Bush Master: The Jungles of Dutch Guiana, Nicol Smith (1943, p. 220)

My argument throughout the preceding section has been that we can utilize travelogues and travel narratives to index how maroons, from the period of slavery into the early 20th century, were gradually imagined as being part of the natural landscape of the Surinamese rainforest. In this section, I would like to show concretely how these representations of maroons were conscripted in a series of development interventions that began in the middle of the 20th century. To do so, we will need to trudge through two more travel narratives, in order to understand how the above tropes came to be redeployed in this assemblage of modernity and development, which so far has not been discussed at length. We are traveling sixty years back in time from where Vandercook left us, to a historical juncture during which the practice of

“gentlemanly speculation” into Suriname’s future and prospects as a colony began (in part, as a result of the appearance of publically available country profile surveys conducted by the foreign offices of states, such HMSO 1920 or Meehan 1927).

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William Gifford Palgrave, a renowned English traveler whose curriculum vitae includes an expedition into the terra incognita of the Arabian peninsula, published a volume about his travels and observations in Dutch Guiana in 1876, and dedicates a good portion of the text to conferring discreet advice from an English perspective. In this work, Palgrave also attests to the verdure of the Surinamese natural world, while also taking due pause to comment on the

grueling, savage tropical climate and its adverse effects on European salubrity (Palgrave 1876: 206). However, Palgrave is far less interested in indulging in erotic poetics of the bush, or in the pursuit of discovering Africa in the Americas; as a sober-minded servant of the British Foreign Office steeped in liberal economics, he is exclusively interested in what Suriname has to offer in terms of resource extraction. In an illustrative passage, Palgrave suggests that

there is no tropical field-growth but finds, or might find, a home in Dutch Guiana; no valuable timber but forms part of her boundless forests; no costly spice is a stranger to her soil; no useful extract alien from the list of her resources. Suriname is the triumph of vegetable life: the triumph of human industry alone is waiting to subjugate and complete (Palgrave 1876: 248)

In other words, Suriname holds an untapped profusion of natural wealth that the Dutch have simply failed to capitalize upon. The suggestion made throughout the text is that the wilderness

can indeed be overcome and tamed permanently (“neither the climate nor the soil” can be said to be at fault (Ibid.)), but the Dutch have simply lacked the energy or industry to do so. Although Palgrave’s perspective is deliberately that of an Englishman and an outsider, this sense of disappointment about the dearth of knowledge production and development in the interior was not exclusively English in kind during this era. It is, for example, replicated in a 1901 text by H. B. Van Lummel titled Suriname en de boschnegers, where the untouched, unexploited status of this “beautiful and fruitful land” is remarked upon by the author at the outset of the narrative (van Lummel 1901: 1).

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What can a treatise like Palgrave’s tell us about representations of maroons in Suriname? Aside from the absence of knowledge about the hinterland, Palgrave argues that the central deficiency of Suriname is the dearth of population—particularly an able population capable of laboring and working the land properly for cultivation and extraction (Palgrave 1876: 254). Like Vandercook, Palgrave trades in on the racial-geographical tropes of the time to argue that the maroons living in the interior present a “copious and, as yet, unemployed reserve force of labor” (Palgrave 1876: 173), in contrast to the “coolies” (or Asian laborers) whose natural physical constitution was understood to be deficient for work in the harsh tropical climate (cf. Redfield 2000: 194). Indeed, in a chapter dedicated to “bush negroes,” Palgrave even argues that the maroons’ climactic aptitude is unrivaled by “Indian aborigines,” who have “wasted away and disappeared, unable not merely to compete but even to co-exist with their African…neighbors” (Palgrave 1876: 142). Palgrave opines that the Bush negroes “hold a good position among men; better, certainly, by far, than that occupied by most of the aboriginal races of the South American continent” (Ibid., 164). Positively estimating their overall resilience, fortitude and

industriousness in agriculture and woodcutting (though delineating a gradient from “best to worst” among maroon groups as has been cliché since Stedman onward), for Palgrave the maroons are the most naturally and climactically apposite bodies available to live, thrive, and most important of all, labor in the brutal rainforest landscape.

However, the trope of savagery or wildness also has a place in Palgrave’s text. For insofar as maroon ‘culture’ remains separate from the colonial infrastructure, he decries their lives and customs are as savage, brutish, and uncivilized. Commenting on the increasing contact between maroons and the capital city, Palgrave ultimately concludes that the colony’s “negro element, now comparatively isolated and wasted in the bush” (Ibid., 173) is best off if brought to

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civilization and ultimately put to use towards the colony’s development. In Palgrave’s racial ontology, maroons bear natural attributes of physical strength and industriousness, but the possible riches that may be harvested by means of these attributes are unattainable so long as they remain in a perpetual state of savagery (in nature). In a number of ways, we see the maroons subjected to a version of what Bruce Braun has called the colonial rhetorics of ‘wilderness’ (figure 5), in which the maroons are conflated with nature only if they remain ‘traditional.’

Figure 5. “The colonial rhetorics of ‘wilderness.’

By mapping these dualisms onto each other (culture-nature, modern-traditional) native peoples are conflated with nature and areas are seen to remain natural only

if the cultures that live there remain ‘traditional.” From Braun’s “Buried Epistemologies…” (1997), p. 22.

With Palgrave, Ralegh’s tropes resurface yet again, although their meaning is somewhat ruptured as a result of their recalibration towards Palgrave’s late nineteenth century universe of

capitalism, modernization, entrepreneurship, interior colonization, and cultural evolutionism. Undoubtedly, this change in narrative emphasis is connected to the capitalist liberal ideologies

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that were becoming prevalent at the time of writing. Nevertheless, a unique trajectory of representations can be discerned from Herlein to Palgrave: the maroons are gradually written into a rainforest already saturated with colonial imaginations, but then with Palgrave, this enduring discursive representation of maroons-in-nature ends up soliciting their development (Wainwright 2008). This is, of course, a closely related assemblage of representations as the one traced in the previous section, but it is nevertheless unique in its prescriptions and mobilization.

Importantly, this assemblage of representations does not vanish with Palgrave’s sober- minded British outlook at the end of the 19th century. In the years which follow, the maroon landscapes came to be highly coveted from the perspective of an exponentially intensifying colonial gaze of the forgotten colony’s interior. This valuation of the maroon-inhabited rainforest figured its way into travelogues of this period as well, such as Jungle Gold: Dad Pedrick’s Story

(1930) and Bush Master: Into the Jungles of Dutch Guiana (1943), both American in nature and published through the Bobbs-Merrill company. Jungle Gold is an account of the early days working on gold extraction in the Surinamese interior, and Bush Master is a fictional narrative based off the author (Nicol Smith)’s own travails in the country. The latter text inundates the reader with a number of passionate, polemical rants about the underdevelopment of the country’s interior through the voice of his protagonists. A number of them sound very similar to Palgrave about the need to develop the interior, as seen in the invective passage which opens this section as well as the following quotation, given as an answer to a question about why Holland has neglected this “black daughter of hers”:

Here is a territory of fifty-five thousand square miles, with the most marvelous natural resources, which could produce ten times as much wealth as it does, but which has not been developed to anywhere near its full possibilities! Its vast forest growths have scarcely been tapped. Its minerals have not been properly explored…Outside of Paramaribo and Nickerie, which isn’t a tenth as big as Paramaribo, there is nothing,

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nothing at all but a few scattered villages near the coast—and all the rest is virtually unexplored jungle! Do you wonder that I say the possibilities of the country have been neglected? (Smith 1943: 36).

As the reader of the previous section of this paper might suspect, this trope of plentitude is not left alone without its cousin danger, and indeed, one of the characters tells us that “‘ten miles in there is nothing but sickness and death, murder and Black Magic” (Ibid., 42). Smith tells us relatively little about the maroons of Suriname, but he channels Vandercook in a number of places in relation to the possibility of “voodoo” and magical practices: “Here at the edge of the great jungle we see only the outer wall of the forest. It seems just as it has always been. But who knows what has been going on behind that green wall? For all we know, the men who live in the bush may have been developing a knowledge of the mysterious forces of nature which have been denied to the men in the laboratories of civilization” (Ibid., 56). But in spite of this amplified feeling of anxiety about the threat posed by the rainforest to white colonizers, the characters in

Bush Master exhibit a strong sense of confidence in modernity’s ability to domesticate the fertility of the rainforest, a logical progression from Palgrave’s exhortations to overcome its difficulties.

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Figure 6. “The negro shacks in the heart of the jungle.”

From Pedrick’s Jungle Gold: Dad Pedrick’s Story (1930), p. 112.

This discourse about the need to develop the rainforest, in particularly the mineral-rich landscape occupied by maroon groups like the Saramaka and N’Djuka, became absolutely central during Suriname’s development era from the mid-1960s onward. During this time, the economic development regime of the Netherlands increasingly began to target the development of the maroons as part of this strategy. According to a Dutch historian, the maroons were

perceived as having “no productive value to the colony...All this would have to be changed, also for the sake of their own advantage. Material benefit for the colony, it was hoped, would accrue from the gain of labour and the heightened productivity” (de Groot: 2009: 164). This meant putting effort into civilizing maroons into becoming ‘useful members of the community’ through education, evangelization, and tighter administrative control but also through increasing

geographical incursions in the name of modernization. For example, the 1963 construction of the Afobaka dam, which inundated dozens of maroon villages and numerous ancestral First-Time sites, was often couched as a pretext for modernizing the interior’s populations. According to

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then Prime Minister Josef Pengel, who is one of the two most important figures in Suriname’s stride towards independence,

there is a shortage of educated [maroon] laborers, but bush-negroes are finally becoming empowered [ingeschakeld; literally, plugged in, or activated]. They were not yet part of the economic process. It will take months to reach the villages, but now already there are 26 airplanes in the interior” (Hasen & de Wagt 100-101).

The Afobaka dam served as the first occasion for the territorialization of maroon lands in the interior. As Richard Price points out, from the perspective of the Dutch government this large-scale development initiative seemed like a natural stride into modernity, but for the maroons it represented the first true incursion into maroon territory since the 18th century raids described by Stedman (Price 2011: 33, 38). Many would follow, particularly in the form of resource extraction of bauxite, lumber, and gold. For many Surinamers today, maroons are understood as remnants of the stone age who need to be ‘developed’ or brought into the modern era (Kambel 2007), and the apparent disjunction between development and preservation of traditional cultures is often mobilized by politicians to argue in favor of the former (because not

developing is, by default, an impossibility) (Price 2011: 199). The feeling of danger has

gradually eroded as incursions and infrastructure-building in the interior escalated, although the 1980s war of the interior lead by maroon militant Ronnie Brunswijk momentarily resuscitated old feelings and anxieties about the dark threat lurking in the bushlands.

From Palgrave’s text to the Afobaka dam, we see how the sedimented tropics of maroons explored earlier came to entangle with liberal ideas about national development, resource

extraction, population mobilization towards labor, and interior colonization; with minerals like bauxite, gold; and with new technologies that engendered the domestication of this formerly hellish natural world. This complex entanglement of human and non-human alike resulted in

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some very real, material consequences, most of all for the maroons themselves. The

representation of the pervasive wildness and oerwoud existence of maroons (in spite of their own long-standing reliance on modern technologies) continues to act as a pretext and justification for interior colonization.

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